The present invention relates to a laminated spacer fabric.
Certain conventional fabrics include a padding or porous layer covered by an outer layer. The underlying padding or porous layer is typically sewn to the outer layer. The outer layer in the conventional sewn assembly may pucker or have other surface deformations resulting from the sewn seams. Additionally, in certain situations, pockets or gaps may be formed between the padding and outer layers. These problems create an undesirable appearance and may decrease the value of a seat or the object utilizing the sewn fabric. The puckering and air pockets may also create an uncomfortable surface when contacted by a person sitting or leaning against the sewn fabric.
The porous or padding layer may be a spacer fabric. The conventional covered spacer fabrics generally result in increased costs for the manufacturer. Rolls or cut pieces of the spacer fabric are produced, pre-cut, and shipped to an assembly plant. After shipment, the spacer fabric tends to lose its dimensions. As a result, the process of sewing a precut outer layer to the spacer fabric is difficult and time-consuming. Another drawback of the conventional spacer fabric is that the edges of the conventional fabric fray and lack dimensional stability.
These covered spacer fabrics have many uses such as, for example, seats, home furnishings, and shoes. Conventional spacer fabrics incorporated in seats may be found, for example, in DE 19931193 (hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety).
The spacer fabric is typically a padding or ventilation layer. Seats generally use spacer fabrics to cool or warm an occupant or remove perspiration. However, typical seats in spacer fabrics wear quickly and may chill or overheat an occupant due to improper air flow.
Spacer fabrics offer several advantages over other padding or ventilation layers such as, for example, foam. First, spacer fabrics are formed from textile fibers and filaments and many textile fiber and filamentary materials are recyclable. Thus, the use of spacer fabrics as a cushioning material overcomes the inability of foams to be recycled and the attendant problems associated with disposal of such materials. Also, spacer fabrics offer substantially enhanced air and moisture permeability over foams, which make such fabrics more desirable than foam materials for use in automotive and marine applications as well as home furnishing applications.
As described above, current textile technology includes spacer fabric materials with sewn on material coverings. Spacer fabrics covered with a sewn on material characteristically have the tendency for the opposing covering and spacer structures to shift and move in parallel with respect to one another. Moreover, there are inherent difficulties in mating a rigid or semi-rigid surface material (e.g. leather) with a non-rigid spacer material through a sewing process. One problem is that the dimensions of the cut pieces of spacer material tend to change size after cutting, typically shrinking in size. As a result, when the cut part of rigid or semi-rigid material is sewn around the perimeter to the cut piece of spacer fabric, the change in dimensions of the spacer material cause puckering and creasing in the rigid or semi-rigid cover layer. A large number of the sewn components have this problem. Present attempts to solve this specific problem have focused on using a more rigid, higher denier monofilament in the spacer fabric to improve the sewing performance and have not been successful. The use of a significantly heavier denier monofilament produces an uncomfortable fabric.
Other problems encountered in joining cut pieces of spacer fabric to cut pieces of a cover material include rough, jagged edges; fraying and shedding of monofilament pile; missing or misplaced notches (to guide the sewer); during sewing, the sewing needle and presser foot snag in the spacer fabric; and sewing “run off” or “raw edge” where the stitches of the joining seam do not grip the spacer fabric. The primary causes of these problems are inconsistent part dimensionality, inherent elasticity of the fabric, and jostling during transit.